Preparing For The Holy War (Revelation 16:16)

For first time, Iran media admit point of missile program was ‘to hit Israel’

Special to WorldTribune.com

NICOSIA — After officially insisting that its nearly 30-year-old ballistic missile program was not targeting any one country, Iran has acknowledged that it was aimed against Israel.

The state-owned Iranian media have given unprecedented details of the origin of Teheran’s ballistic missile program under the Islamic regime. The media quoted senior officials as saying that the impetus for the program was to strike Israel.

“We need a missile that we can use to hit Israel,” Hassan Moghadam, the father of Iran’s missile program killed in an explosion in 2011, was quoted as saying.

The Fars News Agency published a long account by Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Air Force, on the aims of the missile program. Hajizadeh said Teheran, as early as 1986, wanted to rapidly produce a missile with a range of more than 1,000 kilometers to attack Israel.

“We worked simultaneously on liquid- and solid-fuel missiles,” Hajizadeh recalled. “We copied the Shihab-1 missile from the Scud-B, which was productive, and in less two years, we created the 500-kilometer range Shihab-2.”

The account departed from Iran’s long-held claim that the missile program was not meant against any country. Over the last year, Teheran has refused demands by P5+1 to limit its missile program along with nuclear capabilities.

Hajizadeh said Iran, through such agencies as the Defense Ministry and so-called Jihad Ministry, produced a prototype missile with a range of 1,100 kilometers. He said the missiles were deployed in Gilan e-Gharb near the Iraqi border to ensure that they could reach Israel.

“Hassan [Moghadam] believed that we had to attain a range for our missiles that would allow us to threaten the Zionist regime,” Hajizadeh recalled in an interview with Fars on Nov. 12. “If it was not sufficient to reach the occupied territories [Israel], then we’d have a problem.”

Hajizadeh said the first missiles produced by Iran were liquid-fuel, which contained severe limitations. He said Iran proceeded with several stages of development until solid-fuel missiles were produced with ranges of up to 2,000 kilometers.

“At first we would reverse-engineer them, the way we produced the Shihab-1 from the Scud-B or the Shihab-3 from the Scud-C,” Hajizadeh said. “However, thanks to round-the-clock work by our dear scientists, we developed missile-design capabilities — that is, from idea to [final] product, everything is completely Iranian.”

Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei was said to have been the leading lobbyist to improve the accuracy of Teheran’s missile arsenal. Khamenei was quoted as saying that Iran needed to reach a circle error of probability of less than 10 meters. At one point, Iran improved accuracy from a CEP of 2,000 meters to 35 meters.

“‘Your work is excellent and top-notch, but if you can attain a 35-meter [CEP], then you can also attain 10-15 meter,” Hajizadeh quoted Khamenei as saying. “We were in shock. The guys once again went to work, and within five or six months, we had reached accuracy of better than 10 meters.”